How Immersive Audio Transforms Your Home Theater Experience

When you consider adding a home theater to your Jacksonville, FL property, you most likely think about how it will look. From the size of the screen to the clarity of the projection, you can plan for a bright, flawless picture. But a custom theater needs to do more than look good -- it needs to sound incredible, too. In fact, an effectively built theater is optimized for audio as much as it is for video playback. And with an immersive surround sound installation like Dolby Atmos available to make your private cinema sound like the local multiplex, there’s plenty to learn. Want to get started? Keep reading.

See Also: To DIY Or Not To DIY: The Smart Home Dilemma

The Limits of Surround Sound

You’ve probably heard of surround sound. It’s been around since the 1970s and has been a great way to listen to movies in your home theater for decades. However, most surround sound systems in private homes couldn’t compete with the audio available at movie theaters.

Some of it had to do with the sources, but the main reason was the limited capabilities of the system itself. In a traditional surround sound setup, individual sounds are assigned to speakers, or “channels” to create the surround effect. If you’re watching an action movie, the dialogue will come from the speaker in front of you, while the bullets and explosions will come from the ones behind.

As you can imagine, fewer speakers mean fewer variations in the sound’s direction. In other words, a 5.1 channel system won’t sound as good as a system with 60 or more channels -- like what you hear at a Dolby Atmos equipped movie theater.

The Immersive Audio Difference

What makes immersive audio setups different? The biggest difference is that you don’t need a large system to reproduce commercial-quality sound.

A Dolby Atmos system can produce full, 3D sound with a configuration as small as 5.1.2 channels. In other words, five speakers around you, one subwoofer, and two overhead units that create a sphere of sound around the listener.

The other thing that makes Atmos different from standard surround sound is the way the audio is mixed in the movie itself. Instead of assigning each sound to a channel or speaker, sound editors treat each of them as an individual object. Dolby Atmos enables sound engineers to create 128 discrete sound objects in a scene, creating a much richer and more immersive soundscape. So, if you see a rocket firing into outer space, you'll hear the sound start low and slowly move overhead with a realism you have not experienced before.

Immersive audio lets you hear your favorite movies in a whole new way. See how Alpha Dog can transform your surround sound installation today. Click here to get started.